


Revolucionário

by BlackJacketsandPens



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 01:27:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1247563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackJacketsandPens/pseuds/BlackJacketsandPens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Headcanon backstory for The Fear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revolucionário

He had been born to be a revolutionary.

That is what Papai had said, at least. He was brave, he had no fear, and his Papai said that is what the people needed.

Mamãe had not approved of her husband filling their son’s small head with ideals and dreams, but Leandro Santillo had already been hooked, eating up his father’s words with awe and excitement.

The people were poor, they were starving and sick, and the government did not want to listen.

The people wanted a voice and they would get one, even if it must be by force.

When he was 10, his father began to bring him to secret meetings in a friend’s basement, lit by candles and populated by rugged men with shadowed eyes. He would sit in the corner and watch them speak, listen to the fire in their voices, and it was magic. Pure magic, and he was spellbound.

Revolutions came and went, and the crowd in the candle-lit basement thinned and grew, and soon enough Leandro was at the table with them, his own voice joining the din and his eyes bright with the same fire. His father had died, killed in battle like all the others, and Leandro took his place.

There was fire and song and revolution in his blood now, and he could taste it like the headiest wine and it filled him with wild excitement. He needed this like he needed to live, to breathe.

He was famous among the revolutionaries even before he became one of them. The stories had passed around about Santillo’s boy, bright-eyed and always with a wide grin, the boy who climbed trees like a monkey and feared no animal, no insect, could play with spiders and snakes like children’s toys, who once stared down a jaguar unblinking until it went away, who swam gleefully in even the most dangerous waters.

He was handsome and he was reckless, brave and charismatic, and his voice carried loud and far and though he could not read, though he was poor and barefoot, his words were like kindling on a flame.

He was only seventeen when Vargas took power, and the company dissolved. They were content, despite the depression, and they were willing to trust him.

Leandro was lost, aimless. The fire in his blood, the taste of revolution and battle, he needed it. It was his life, his air and his water, his food and wine, he needed to be in battle, in war, needed to be fighting for something, no matter what it was. He needed something to fight for, anything.

He found himself among people he hardly knew, people who spoke in unfamiliar (Russian?) accents and were more powerful than the skinny young man with shabby clothes and ill-fitting boots, but they saw his eyes and the light in them and they allowed him to fight.

They attempted a coup, and though Leandro did not quite understand what he was fighting for, it was still a cause. They lost, badly, and the twenty-two year old crept off to lick his wounds.

It had been his first real battle, his first time seeing men die and blood run in the streets and his first time holding cold steel (though he had hated the gun, tossed it on the cobbles and used his father’s hunting crossbow instead, the old wood feeling like home in his hands). It was more wine, more heroin, and he was drunk on it again.

He had been raised partially by the wild, and he realized that his childhood games and skills could be useful. He slipped back home for a time, practicing and waking up old muscles, old knowledge - climbing trees until his arms screamed and he could shift some leaves away and look out on an ocean of vibrant green stretching to touch the sky, slipping through dense tree trunks and collecting his old childhood companions, the spiders and snakes and deadly small things that crept among the moss and dirt and fungus. They bit him, and stung him, and he did not remember how many times he woke up staring at sunlight or moonlight through leaves, his mouth dry and skin soaked with sweat, lungs and heart clawing back to normalcy.

He loved it. He lived in the forests for some time, hunting and learning and slowly and unknowingly letting his tenuous grasp on sanity slip out of his fingers. He was one with nature, with the forest and the trees and deadly things, and he did not notice it go, and if he had, he would not have cared.

Armed with his new pets and his crossbow and his skills, he returned to civilization in time to find new companions to fight for, with a new reason. What it was no longer mattered, his original purpose lost to desperation and the wild, so long as he was able to fight.

It went badly, horribly badly, and he was arrested. The soldiers would tell stories of the wild man they captured, laughing like a madman as they dragged him off, tangled dark hair in his face and eyes fever-bright, grubby, discolored clothing torn and stained with dirt and blood.

He had no family, none to claim him, none to miss him, so they dragged him deep into the bowels of the prison, telling him that they wished him to fight for them now. He did not care, and he told them so. He would fight for whatever, whoever, as long as there was a reason. They laughed.

They did not tell him until it was too late of the things they wished to do to him. He was a symbol of fear among the men already, they said as they strapped him writhing and wide-eyed to a table, and fear is strong and it is powerful. Fear can control the masses, turn the tide of battle, and we will make you more than just a symbol - we will make you fear itself.

They tore him open, breaking bone and twisting muscle, arms and legs bent and unnaturally loose. They pried his mouth open, and he choked and gagged on the foreign flesh in his mouth, long and sinuous like a snake. They went at his eyes, and he was blinded for days and even after bright lights were like knives tearing at him.

The transformation into fear was not just physical, either. He was left in the basements, bloody and wracked with pain, and allowed to hunt, no, forced to hunt. They set live food for him, rats and birds and small animals, and he caught them and ate them raw because he had to. They left him bigger animals, and he learned his new abilities through trial and error, skittering along the floor like one of his beloved spiders, bending impossibly to capture his meal, or letting his new, terribly long tongue do it for him.

He lived on the taste of blood and bones, the filthy monster in the basement being conditioned to be their animal, their creature, their demon, until one day the doors were thrown open and a woman came to him.

He thought she was an angel, in his slowed and cluttered mind, with golden hair and kind, strong eyes. He crouched in a corner, half-naked and caked with blood and dirt, reptilian eyes squinted against the light and hair long and matted, and still she did not seem to mind.

She knelt in front of him and offered him a hand. Come with me, she said, in near-perfect Portuguese. I will give you a reason to fight, a noble and worthy one. You will be my soldier and my comrade, and you will fight for me.

Who are you, he asked, and his voice was thick and rasping and hardly intelligible.

I am Joy, she explained. Joy of the Cobra Unit, and you will be our Fear.

He nodded at her slowly, and agreed. The long-forgotten revolutionary inside him had stirred quietly at her words, and he remembered the fire, and agreed.

So he left the darkness and the shadows behind, and he became her Fear, his laughter and his grin returning with his humanity (or some of it), and he danced in the treetops, relishing what he had been made for. And he fought for a reason he  _believed_  in again, his original untainted fire had returned, and that made all the difference in the world.

He was Fear and he fought for Joy, and that was simple enough to him.


End file.
